Docker for Rails Developers

Getting Started with Compose

Docker Compose—or just Compose for short—is a tool for managing an application that needs several different containers to work together. Compose is declarative: you describe each part of your application—known as a service—and Compose handles the grunt work of ensuring the right containers are run when and how you need. It also manages creating and destroying the resources needed for the app. For example, it creates a separate, private network for your application, giving you a predictable, isolated environment. As we’ll see in Part 2, ​Toward Production​, it also plays a key role in how we deploy and scale applications with Docker.

Compose is designed with developers in mind. It lets us interact with our application ...